Thursday, Marianne Akins Suski will travel to Arlington National Cemetery to witness the burial of her father, Army Sgt. 1st Class W.T. Akins, with full military honors.

It's a moment Suski's family has both waited for and despaired of. She was 2 1/2 years old when her father, a native of Decatur, was declared missing in action. She is a grandmother now. W.T. Akins disappeared during combat in Korea 58 years ago.

Photos courtesy of family (ENLARGE)

Mary Elizabeth Akins, waited decades for news of her husband and spurned any suitors.

(ENLARGE)

Marianne Akins Suski, when she was 5 years old.

(ENLARGE)

Army Sgt. W.T. Akins in 1946. Four years later he was missing in action.

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The daughter barely knew her father, but she's lived a lifetime with a mother who never stopped hoping that he would somehow return. And after more than half a century in an unmarked grave on a foreign battlefield, Sgt. Akins is indeed coming home.

"For 60 years she's believed this could happen," Suski said. "It's a miracle, and sometimes miracles happen for all the right reasons, to the right people."

W.T. Akins, those who knew him say, was a gentle soul, a man who had an easy rapport with his patients and his fellow soldiers.

Growing up near Sycamore Drive in Decatur, he played in the woods behind the Scott family's vast property, and his pets included a trained rooster and a wild white dog that he claimed was a wolf.

He was 13 years older than his niece, Barbara Akins, whose family shared a house with his, and he occasionally accepted responsibility for her care without grumbling.

Even after she discovered, then accidentally broke, a homemade crystal radio under his bed, "he never raised his voice," she said.

Akins, who his family called "Dub" or "W.T." but never by his given name, William Thomas, attended Avondale High School, but apparently didn't graduate. Instead he joined a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, which was a guarantee of decent food and lodging during the lean years of the Great Depression.

As soon as he was old enough, he enlisted as a medic in the Army. There he found his true love and his true home.

"He was military down to the socks he had on," said his widow, Mary Elizabeth Akins, 88, who now lives in a continuing-care facility not far from Arlington in McLean, Va. She was part of the nursing corps at Stark General Hospital in Charleston, S.C., when she met the young medic from Georgia.

During World War II, he served in evacuation hospitals in North Carolina, while she worked Florida. After she left the Army, they married and had a child. At one point, she says, they caught a traveling production of the World War II musical "South Pacific," and its songs became their songs. He bought her a little music box that played "Some Enchanted Evening."

Akins was stationed at Fort Monmouth, N.J., when he was sent overseas during the Korean conflict. She didn't try to talk him out of going.

"I couldn't see any point in it," Mrs. Akins said. "That's what he wanted to do."

MIA in November 1950

W.T. Akins had been in Korea for just six months when Communist Chinese troops overran his Medical Company's position on the Kuryong River near Unsan. It was November 1950, and after the battle, he was among 350 soldiers unaccounted for. All these years later, some 8,100 U.S. veterans of the Korean conflict remain MIA, according to the Defense Department.

Her husband remained listed as missing for several years, but Mrs. Akins always kept expecting him to walk in the door.

"My mother was under the impression that there was a real possibility that he was coming back alive," said her daughter. "She was willing to wait."

The young mother and daughter stayed with friends in Charleston for a while, then with a brother in Baltimore, and then made a home of their own.

"She went back to work," Suski said. "She's good at managing money, she's tough as nails, and she did what she had to do."

Mary Akins kept all her letters from her husband in her bedside table. She kept the suit she wore after they were married in the front of her bedroom closet. From time to time, she would open her music box and listen to it play "Some Enchanted Evening."

Over the years she had suitors but was never interested in remarrying. "I was so busy raising Little Miss Business there," she said, referring to her daughter, "I didn't have time to think about it."

Science, luck play roles

As time passed, Mary Akins' hopes about her husband's fate changed. More than anything, she wanted an answer. Was he dead? Was he languishing in a POW camp? What happened?

Her answer would finally come, almost 60 years after his disappearance, thanks to sophisticated science and some luck.

Last year a U.S. delegation including New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson went to North Korea to secure, among other things, the return of six boxes of human remains found near Unsan in November 2006 and believed to be those of U.S. soldiers.

Forensic pathologists at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii would use dental records, DNA and other evidence to help identify the bodies. They also had some larger clues. Sgt. Akins' dog tags, for instance, were among the items returned from North Korea.

For a positive identification, though, the pathologists rely on mitochondrial DNA, which must be traced through the mother's side of the family.

As luck would have it, W.T. Akins' mother was a Cagle — Molly Cagle of Jasper, who married W.T. Akins Sr. from Ball Ground. Lucky because Pickens County is thickly settled with the Cagle clan. The Army contacted Barbara Akins Loyd (Akins' niece) in Hiawassee, and last year she went to the yearly Cagle family reunion in Pickens.

There, her cousin Earl Cagle helped track down a female descendant of Molly's sister, who provided a DNA sample. It matched.

The Army informed Suski that her father's remains had been located.

Suski took a train from her home in West Hartford, Conn., to Virginia to tell her mother in person.

As the daughter recalls, "She look like she was suspended in space for a minute."

The mother wanted to know, had he been tortured?

They tell me he died instantly, the daughter said.

"I was just afraid he'd been in a prison or something," the mother said later. "It was such a great relief to know he hadn't suffered all those years."

Thursday at Arlington National Cemetery, the family that her husband never knew, including three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, will gather to hear the trumpet play taps, and to finally welcome Sgt. W.T. Akins home.